Reviewed by Emily Webber
Girl in a Box: Seeking Enlightenment as a Tibetan Buddhist Nun (Monkfish Books; May 2026) by Paldrom Catharine Collins is a candid spiritual memoir chronicling Collins’s attempt to escape a sense of emptiness through ascetic devotion. Raised in a Southern Baptist household in Oklahoma and married at eighteen, Collins felt an inner ache and spiritual restlessness that mainstream religion could not satisfy. After encountering the work of Ram Dass, Carlos Castaneda, and Paramahansa, she leaves her marriage and teaching career to seek enlightenment through Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhist practices.
I was interested in this memoir because of my research on Catholic women’s religious orders. I had little knowledge of Buddhist spiritual beliefs, the vows Buddhist nuns take, or their daily routines. Collins introduces Tibetan Buddhism in a straightforward way, explaining key concepts clearly and demonstrating how they intersect with common human doubts, minor frustrations, and spiritual goals.
Entering a Tibetan Buddhist monastery and retreat center in New York’s Hudson Valley. Collins spends five years at the monastery. She works through a series of mental and physical spiritual tasks to help her attain enlightenment. I always thought of Buddhism as a mental practice of rigorous meditation and complete focus. But Collins also details the physical demands, such as the grueling process of 100,000 full-body prostrations and restrictions on eating.
Slowly, she fully surrenders her identity, including shaving her head and changing her name. She takes the vows of a nun, including celibacy, no solid food after midday, and austere living conditions such as no luxurious bed, no entertainment, and no jewelry. During the day, Collins cleans houses to raise funds for a three-year retreat. She believes the solitary, cloistered time will finally help her attain enlightenment. That it will allow her more of the few glimpses of another reality, of “something beyond the veil.”
“Just for an instant or two, with the ting-ting of Lama’s tingshas, reality cracked. This was not an intellectual understanding. Not a believing, but a knowing, penetrating reason. I was in a dream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily. My very me-ness was as the Mahamudra text had described—a mirage, a story, a dream. I don’t know if the gift of this moment was a further unfolding of the awareness invoked by Khenpo Tsultrim’s teaching in the shrine room. Or if all those fifteen-minute stretches of bringing my focus to my breath again and again had created a new neural pathway. Or maybe it was grace. Or maybe some combination of all of those. Or none of them.”
Instead, once she is on the retreat, she cannot shake her uncertainty. She begins to question some of the strict rules. Then more than question, she begins to modify some of her practices without telling anyone.
“I so wanted to be a successful nun, even though I continued to avoid wearing the yards and yards of my shamthap whenever possible. But now, faced with this dilemma, I concluded my best option was to simply skip this fourth segment of Ngöndro. This was more than a minor rebellion. I knew if I consulted with Lama about my decision, he’d never condone it, and then my samaya would require me to comply. So, I decided to never ask.”
As she continues to explore her own doubts and hesitations, Collins also begins to see how the revered teachers subtly pick and choose which rules to follow and when. Even worse, how institutions, even with the best intentions, are flawed. Collins pulls back the curtain on the authoritarian abuses of power and the sexual exploitation of male and female practitioners by revered teachers.
I’d argue with anyone who says a true spiritual or faith journey is straightforward, not an ever-evolving path filled with reset expectations, doubt, loneliness, and grief alongside true grace and clarity. Collins shows this complex journey with total honesty in Girl in a Box. Eventually, realizing that, for her, true awakening cannot come from shutting herself off from the world. Rather than succumbing to cynicism, Collins draws on her Buddhist training, her Christian upbringing, and other lessons learned along the way to find peace in her ordinary life in the world.
Emily Webber is a writer of criticism, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Her work has appeared in Rain Taxi, the Ploughshares Blog, The Rumpus, Writer magazine, America Magazine, and elsewhere. She’s the author of a chapbook of flash fiction, Macerated.
